Psychical Spacings

Author(s):  
Paul Earlie

This chapter explores the complex relationship between spatiality and the psyche in psychoanalysis and in deconstruction. For Derrida, Freud’s spatialized models of the mind are a key element in psychoanalysis’s break with the traditional ‘Platonism’ of metaphysics, explored here through the examples of Plato and Edmund Husserl. In attending to the importance of space in Derrida’s work, this chapter provides a detailed account of his well-known neologism ‘différance’. Although différance has sometimes been interpreted as a theory of time, Derrida’s engagement with the phenomenological and psychoanalytic traditions highlights différance’s status as a movement of spacing (espacement), as the structural ‘co-implication’ of time and space. This co-implication is examined here through a reading of Derrida’s early essay, ‘Freud et la scène de l’écriture’ (‘Freud and the Scene of Writing’), a text which surveys the problematic relationship between anatomical (or neurological) space and the virtual space of Freud’s metapsychology. Situating Derrida as a thinker of spatial difference and its aporias provides an important means of engaging his work with the recent ‘materialist’ turn in the humanities, represented here in Catherine Malabou’s neuroscientific challenge to deconstruction.

Popular Music ◽  
2010 ◽  
Vol 29 (2) ◽  
pp. 181-197 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ruth Dockwray ◽  
Allan F. Moore

AbstractWhen a stereophonic track is heard through headphones or over loudspeakers, the image of a virtual performance is created in the mind. This virtual performance, which exists exclusively on the record, can be conceptualised in terms of the ‘sound-box’ (Moore 1993), a four-dimensional virtual space within which sounds can be located through: lateral placement within the stereo field; foreground and background placement due to volume and distortion; height according to sound vibration frequency; and time. From the mid-1960s, the increasing shift from mono to stereo meant that producers and engineers had to contend with the notion and potential of a song's sonic arrangement or mix, resulting in a disparity of sonic placement and a diverse range of sound-box configurations. By 1972, a normative positioning of sound sources within the sound-box was established, which we term the ‘diagonal mix’. This article focuses on the consolidation of this norm by means of a ‘taxonomy of mixes’ and the utilisation of visual representations which detail the sound-box configurations of a variety of pop/rock, easy listening and psychedelic tracks from 1966 to 1972.


2021 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 114-127
Author(s):  
Tiffany Rhoades Isselhardt

Where are the girls who made history? What evidence have they left behind? Are there places and spaces that bear witness to their memory? Girl Museum was founded in 2009 to address these questions, among many others. Established by art historian Ashley E. Remer, whose work revealed that most, if not all, museums never explicitly discuss or center girls and girlhood, Girl Museum was envisioned as a virtual space dedicated to researching, analyzing, and interpreting girl culture across time and space. Over its first ten years, we produced a wide range of art in historical and cultural exhibitions that explored conceptions of girlhood and the direct experiences of girls in the past and present. Led by an Advisory Board of scholars and entirely reliant on volunteers and donations, we grew from a small website into a complex virtual museum of exhibitions, projects, and programs that welcomes an average 50,000 visitors per year from around the world.


2018 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 60
Author(s):  
Recep Dogan

Human beings express their emotions through the language of art; it is therefore both the spirit of progress and one of the most important means of developing emotions. Consequently, those who cannot make use of this means are incomplete in their maturation. Ideas and other products of the imagination can be given tangible form with the magical key of art. By means of art, humanity can exceed the limits of the earth and reach feelings beyond time and space. Beauty in the realm of existence can be recognized through art. Moreover, the great abilities inherent in human nature can be understood and witnessed in works of art. However, from an Islamic point of view, there are some restrictions on certain fields such as sculpture and painting. It is therefore imperative to analyse the notion of art in Islam and its philosophy and then reflect upon the need of the spirit to connect to God through the language of art while meeting some religious obstacles on the way.


2016 ◽  
Vol 25 (4) ◽  
pp. 403-418 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sara Salem

‘Intersectionality’ has now become a major feature of feminist scholarly work, despite continued debates surrounding its precise definition. Since the term was coined and the field established in the late 1980s, countless articles, volumes and conferences have grown out of it, heralding a new phase in feminist and gender studies. Over the past few years, however, the growing number of critiques leveled against intersectionality warrants us as feminists to pause and reflect on the trajectory the concept has taken and on the ways in which it has traveled through time and space. Conceptualizing intersectionality as a traveling theory allows for these multiple critiques to be contextualized and addressed. It is argued that the context of the neoliberal academy plays a major role in the ways in which intersectionality has lost much of its critical potential in some of its usages today. It is further suggested that Marxist feminism(s) offers an important means of grounding intersectionality critically and expanding intersectionality’s ability to engage with feminism transnationally.


Author(s):  
Thomas C. Powell

William James (1842–1910) contributed groundbreaking ideas to empirical philosophy, metaphysics, and psychology, and influenced some of the greatest minds of the twentieth century, including Edmund Husserl, Alfred North Whitehead, and Ludwig Wittgenstein. This chapter explores James’s contributions to management studies. Focusing on James’s first major work, Principles of Psychology (1890), the chapter traces his influence on three major streams of social research––process philosophy, phenomenology, and functionalism––and follows these streams as they flowed into research on organizations and management. James believed that experience could not be forced into static systems or grand unified theories, but was ‘a snowflake caught in the warm hand’. For social scientists, his work shows the virtues of embracing human experience in all its pluralism, and reawakening the mind to forgotten potentialities.


Semiotica ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 2018 (223) ◽  
pp. 219-250
Author(s):  
Marta Pucciarelli ◽  
Sara Vannini

Abstract This study investigates the complex relationship between the physical and digital spaces of the city of Douala, Cameroon by comparing its online representation with the social representations emerging orally by locals. Using the results of two existing studies reporting on the online image of the city, we investigate the social representations foreigners and locally relevant people have of Douala and uncover similarities and discrepancies of the two resulting representations. Outcomes from the analysis permit reflection on the implications of these and show an unripe, intermediate stage of the “hybrid Douala,” where the virtual space seems still not to be affecting the way the physical space is experienced, as well as where the gaps in the digital divide are perpetuated. At the same time, strong local ownership of certain digital activities suggests how the online image of the city is in the process of being constructed and developed locally. As the spaces of the city start appearing online, the process of hybridization between physical and digital Douala is slowly taking place and offline and online narratives, now rather separated, will possibly communicate a different image of the city to global online narratives.


Author(s):  
Noemi Pizarroso Lopez

Historical psychology claims that the mind has a history, that is, that our ways of thinking, reasoning, perceiving, feeling, and acting are not necessarily universal or invariable, but are instead subject to modifications over time and space. The theoretical and methodological foundations of this movement were laid in France by psychologist Ignace Meyerson in his book Les fonctions psychologiques et les œuvres, published in 1948. His program stressed the active, experimental, constructive nature of human behavior, spanning behavioral registers as diverse as the linguistic, the religious, the juridical, the scientific/technical, and the artistic. All these behaviors involve aspects of different mental functions that we can infer through a proper analysis of “works,” considered as consolidated testimonies of human activity. As humanity’s successive achievements, constructed over the length of all the paths of the human experience, they are the materials with which psychology has to deal. Meyerson refused to propose an inventory of functions to study. As unstable and imperfect products of a complex and uncertain undertaking, they can be analyzed only by avoiding the counterproductive prejudice of metaphysical fixism. Meyerson spoke in these terms of both deep transformations of feelings, of the person, or of the will, and of the so-called “basic functions,” such as perception and the imaginative function, including memory, time, space, and object. Before Meyerson the term “historical psychology” had already been used by historians like Henri Berr and Lucien Febvre, a founding member of the Annales school, who firmly envisioned a sort of collective psychology of times past. Meyerson and his disciples eventually vied with their fellow historians of the Annales school for the label of “historical psychology” and criticized their notions of mentality and outillage mental. The Annales historians gradually abandoned the label, although they continued to cultivate the idea that mental operations and emotions have a history through the new labels of a “history of mentalities” and, more recently at the turn of the century, a “history of emotions.” While Meyerson and a few other psychologists kept using the “historical psychology” label, however, mainstream psychology remained quite oblivious to this historical focus. The greatest efforts made today among psychologists to think of our mental architecture in terms of transformation over time and space are probably to be found in the work of Kurt Danziger and Roger Smith.


1997 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 6-14
Author(s):  
Swami Sivananda Radha

Every man and woman is a bridge between two worlds, the material and the mental. The body is the material tangible side, subject to its own laws; the mind, which uses the body as a tool of expression (frequently violating the physical laws), has its own realm of time and space where it roams about, often undirected or misdirected. The body is material – the bones, muscles,blood, and everything that makes up the cells. The brain, too, is material. The mind, however, is immaterial and intangible; we can only become aware of it through its manifestation in thought and other functions.


2021 ◽  
Vol 70 (2) ◽  
pp. 177-188
Author(s):  
Tatjana Marković

This paper looks at the doll through the uneasy relationship between "tradition" and "contemporaneity". The traditional doll, both as a concept and as an artefact, belongs to the real world. It is defined as an object, an immobile figure controlled by a child. The traditional doll has no pretensions to be alive, and thus bears little resemblance to a human being. It is simple, unobtrusive, direct, mysterious, dependent on the child that gives it life during play. It has two fundamental virtues: silence, which is at the same time its most important means of communication, and submissiveness, which is based on fellowship and which implies the leaving of space to the "other", more precisely, to the child who is in fact "the first" and whom the doll "follows". Contemporary dolls can be material and non-material. Material dolls are most commonly made of inorganic materials, while non-material dolls are made of shadows, reflections, projections of symbolic form. Both have convincing human characteristics that they achieve thanks to various programs and "mechanisms". Contemporary dolls are seductive, talkative and ready to build "parasocial" and "postbiological" relationships in the digital world. Their supreme values are entertainment, noise, surprise, saturation of the senses, few demands on the mind. They aspire to be "first", and "demand" that the child should be in "second" position. A comparative study of these two dolls through a circle of ontological questions situated within the animate-inanimate opposition contributes to a better understanding of the status of the traditional/contemporary doll, the boundaries between man/the child and the doll, and relationships between people. The triumph of contemporary dolls threatens the status and the continued existence of the traditional doll. Due to the "humanization" of dolls and the "dollization" of people, the boundaries between people and dolls have been blurred. Increased intimacy with contemporary dolls leads to changes in social patterns based on greater distance between people.


2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Duan Yiwen

Zazenkai, also known as Zen meditation or Zen Mindfulness, is held in Japan for the general public, usually with time, place and procedures set by a Buddhist Zen Temple. With the emergence of the Internet and new media, several Zen Temples have started to hold Zazenkai by utilizing these media technologies including online live streaming. This new type of Zazenkai is known as Internet Zazenkai. Compared with traditional Zazenkai that are held at a certain time and place, the application of new media enables Internet Zazenkai to go beyond the spatial and temporal limits of nature, where Zen practitioners in different global locations participate together using webcam. Individuals spatially separated from each other could share the same time and space of Zazenkai on the Internet. While the new media technologies open up new opportunities for Zazenkai, they also invite examinations into religious meanings of time and space for Zen practitioners. This paper is based on the study and examination of Internet Zazenkai regularly held by Treeleaf Zendo, a Soto Zen temple in Tsukuba. Its homepage Treeleaf.org is a virtual space where live streaming of Zazenkai is provided, its recorded videos are kept, web podcast of lectures and talks are heard, and so on. By analyzing the techno-ritual phenomenon, this paper attempts to analyze the role of Zen masters and participants in the process of Internet Zazenkai and to examine the differences and similarities between traditional Zazenkai and Internet Zazenkai. This paper will shed new light on the influence of new media upon religious and ritual space in modern society.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document